A total of 2,622,808 citizens, 7% of the electoral census, have requested to vote by correspondence on 23-J, according to official data provided by the Post Office once the deadline for requesting it ended the day before yesterday. The majority, almost three out of four, have done so in person at Post Offices; the remaining 25% requested it through the web with an electronic ID.
It is a historic figure, well above the 1.3 million requests processed in the April 2019 general elections, which fell on Easter, or the 997,530 requests when the elections were repeated half a year later.
It is a great challenge for Correos. The public company has until tomorrow, Sunday, to send all these voters the electoral documentation. Yesterday there were some 700,000 voters to serve, Rubén Valdés, sector manager of the UGT in Catalonia, told this newspaper.
This weekend, two thousand branches across the country – all of Madrid and Barcelona, and especially in tourist areas – will open exceptionally. There will also be extraordinary deals.
Voters have until next Thursday, June 20, to cast their vote. Following the vote-buying scandals in the municipal elections in May, the Electoral Board has decided that in these elections the voter must personally deliver their vote at the Post Office, after identifying themselves with a valid document.
The unions have been complaining for days about the effort made by the Post Office employees. The issue erupted in the campaign due to some words by Alberto Nuñez Feijóo in which he seemed to accuse the leadership of the Post Office (a public company that he presided over during the Aznar government, 2000-2003) of hindering the process, although he later qualified that he did not hint at any pouting.
Those responsible for the postal sector of CC.OO. and UGT, Alberto Pérez and José Manuel Sayagués, yesterday sent a letter to the president of the public company, Juan Manuel Serrano, in which they ask him for an urgent meeting this Monday and accuse him of practicing an "information closure" that fuels uncertainty in public opinion and "is creating shadows over the vote-by-mail process that we cannot tolerate... Added to this is the information we are receiving from some of our managers, which leads us to consider that there may be critical points, that if This is how they must be detected immediately and solved ”, they warn.
The two majority unions maintain a hard fight with Serrano, that before arriving at the position was chief of staff of the federal executive commission of the PSOE. They accuse him of seeking "the dismantling of the universal postal service" and consider the 20,000 reinforcement contracts that the company has signed to face this electoral appointment insufficient, which is a special challenge because it falls in the middle of summer, with 20% of the vacation template.
In an attempt to calm things down, Serrano sent a letter to the 45,000 employees to acknowledge "the many hours of work and weekends without rest." In a clear allusion to Feijóo, he asks "to stay out of interested debates that call into question the public service or undermine the institutions of our country, such as the Post Office."
